8. Farrow
Chapter eight
Farrow
Wiley came down at four a.m. ready to work. I was in the kitchen, waiting on the kettle to brew a pot of English breakfast tea.
He headed for the parlor, one of the hardened laptops tucked under his arm.
Reed had returned to his post an hour earlier. Dane had lingered until two a.m. before I’d finally convinced him he needed at least a few hours of sleep. Even then, he’d taken a room above the parlor. It was close enough to be down the stairs in seconds.
I carried two mugs of steaming tea into the parlor. The laptop screen cast a thin wash of light across Wiley’s face. He wasn’t typing yet. His hands hovered over the keyboard, settled on the edge, and then rose again.
“Up already?” I asked.
He didn’t look away from the screen. “Define up.”
“Functional.”
“Then no.”
I set a mug on the coffee table beside him and kept mine as I settled into the chair opposite.
“You’re stuck,” I said.
He looked up as I reached for the lamp on the side table and clicked it on low. “I’m not stuck.”
“You are.” I kept my voice level. “You have more than you can hold in your head, and you don’t know how to lay it out.”
He closed the laptop and set it on the couch beside him. He reached for the mug.
“Tea, and not coffee?”
“For me, coffee is a social affectation. I prefer a pot of English breakfast in the morning.”
“Both are only vessels for the caffeine, far as I’m concerned.” He took a swallow and exhaled into the steam. “And by the way, I know what I’m doing.”
“I don’t doubt that, but you’re trying to solve all of it at once, and that isn’t how this works.”
He leaned back and crossed one ankle over the other. “What do you want me to do?”
“We’re not starting with what you know now.”
“That seems inefficient.”
“It isn’t. When did you first hear the name Onyx Bay?”
He didn’t answer right away. He held his tea without drinking, watching the steam.
“Two years ago. February.”
“Where?”
“A funding document. It was a footnote in a non-profit filing—Onyx Bay Holdings, listed as a contractor. It had a website with a domain whose registration had expired.”
“You kept the name.”
“I keep everything that goes nowhere.” He set the mug down. “That’s the job. The interesting things are always the ones that don’t immediately share their secrets.”
“When did it stop being a footnote?”
“Six months later. A different non-profit in a different state listed it. That was the first time I wrote the name in a notebook instead of storing it in my head.”
“And then?”
“Then it kept showing up. Slowly at first. Never enough times in any single place for someone to flag, but the pattern was there if you’d been looking for two years, which nobody did except me.”
I let him keep going.
“Last spring, something changed. The entities Onyx Bay contracted with started overlapping. Two of them shared a registered agent. Three of them had board members in common. They were still pretending to be unrelated nonprofits, but underneath they’d started consolidating.”
“Consolidating toward what?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out for the last eight months.” His jaw set. “I have the financial picture. What I don’t have is the point of it. What's the reason for the money, and what's it actually funding?”
I watched him.
“You think you’re close.”
“I thought I was close two weeks ago.” He looked at me. “That’s why I’m in your safehouse, Farrow.”
“Walk me through the last eight months,” I said. “Not what you wrote. What you didn’t.”
He nodded once and started.
“There are three things I never put in the Globe’s system.“ He exhaled. “Force of habit. If something feels like it might get me killed, I keep it on paper in a notebook at home.”
“Where’s the notebook now?”
“In Samuel’s office. I placed it behind a row of monographs on Olmsted. He doesn’t know it’s there.”
“Why not? He’d let you keep it there if he did.”
“He’d let me, but he wouldn’t like it. That’s why I didn’t ask.”
“What’s in it?” I asked.
He looked down at the laptop.
“Three things. The first is a person. The second is a place, and the third is a date.”
I waited.
“The person is a man named Dietrich Kohler. He was born in Germany and became a naturalized citizen in 2014. He runs a private-security consultancy out of a co-working space in Stamford. On paper, he does executive protection for tech executives. In practice, his name is on the contracting paperwork for two of the Onyx Bay shell entities. His is the only specific name that appears on more than one of them.”
“Have you met him?”
“Once. We were both at a charity event in New York eighteen months ago. He was polite. I remembered the accent, barely there, but present if you’re listening.”
Wiley wasn’t done.
“The place is a property in northern Vermont. It’s a defunct ski lodge, bought in 2019 through an LLC I discovered almost a year ago. It has the Onyx Bay fingerprints, contracts for renovation with more than one of the shell companies.”
“And you’ve been there?”
“I drove past it once, last April. From the road, you can see a gate, a generator shed, and a satellite dish.”
“You didn’t get out.”
“No, Samuel was in the car, and I said it was a scenic detour on a weekend getaway.”
“And the date?”
“Eleven days from now.”
“The wedding date. What do you know, Wiley?”
“Nothing specific. It’s a date that has been appearing in monitored channels for at least a year. I shared that information with Patterson.”
I stood. “I’ll be right back. This requires a refill.”
I returned with the full pot of tea and set it on the coffee table between us. Wiley topped off his mug, and I filled mine.
“Last question for now,” I said.
He sipped.
“What did Samuel say last night?”
Wiley exhaled.
“He asked me what time it was where I was. I told him. He said the radiator in the front hall is making the noise again, the one I told him not to worry about in October. The guy he called is coming on Thursday. He told me he had soup for dinner and read for an hour and went to bed early. He asked me if I was somewhere I could sleep. I said yes. He said good, then sleep, and hung up.”
A pause.
“Five minutes. He told me that he loved me. He didn’t ask anything else.”
“Why?”
“Because if he’d asked anything else, I’d have answered him. And he didn’t want to make me lie.”
I saw the shape of Samuel and why Wiley protected him. I’d never had anything so valuable in my life.
In the doorway from the front hall, Dane appeared. Cabot followed down the steps behind him.
“I’m early,” Dane announced, “but some overlap is good.” He reached up and raked his fingers through his short, dark hair.
“I’m the last one up,” Cabot said as he reached the bottom of the stairs.
“There’s tea,” I said, “and extra mugs in the kitchen.”
“That’s the best you can do?” asked Dane.
“At five in the morning, in someone else’s kitchen, with three men I’m not sleeping with? Yes.”
Wiley laughed. It was genuine.
Dane took up a position by the shuttered windows instead of sitting while Cabot headed for the kitchen. He came back with two mugs and sat in the chair opposite mine..
“I thought of something while I was waking up.”
“Important?” Dane asked.
“I’m not sure, and it’s only one word. It sounded wrong when the stranger said it last August.”
“Wrong in what way?” I asked.
Cabot poured himself a mug of tea. “The word was nephew, and it was the ph. It came out hard, not the usual form of speaking at these events. It was almost Germanic.”
“Who heard it?” Dane asked.
Cabot turned his head. “Only me.” He paused. “Well, I suppose anyone speaking with him could pick up something like that.”
“Kohler?” Wiley asked.
“Have you told anyone else outside of the family about the stranger, Cabot?”
“Only Patterson. It was in a meeting after the August event. I wanted a second opinion on what I should cover and what I shouldn’t.”
Wiley needed air.
He didn’t say so. He started pacing in small, tight loops from the couch to the front window and back. His focus began to fray.
I caught Dane’s eye across the room. He nodded slightly toward the front hall.
“Coat,” I said to Wiley.
He stopped and blinked. “What?”
“We’re walking.”
“That’s not—“
“It is. Twelve minutes.”
“It’s still dark out.”
“With the gaslights, this neighborhood is never fully dark,” I said. “The world is waking up.”
He hesitated for one beat, and then he headed for the hall closet to retrieve his coat.
Dane stepped up to my side. I held out my hand, and he set an earpiece in my palm without comment. I seated it, tested the channel with a single tap, and got the soft tone back.
“Twelve minutes,” I said.
“Ten would be better.”
“Twelve.”
He didn’t argue. He moved to the foot of the stairs, where he could see both Reed at the front door and Cabot in the parlor.
Outside, the air was raw. November was bleeding into December. The sidewalk was damp under the soles of my boots. The wrought-iron railings sweated faintly. A gull was working a paper bag in the gutter a block ahead of us.
Dane would have checked the curb through his phone. I moved out ahead of Wiley, sweeping the block. It was clear.
We turned onto the sidewalk. Wiley fell in slightly off my left shoulder. He was learning. The principal who walks at your shoulder is the principal who will change direction when you move; the principal who walks half a step ahead is the principal you have to stop.
Wiley started talking within the first half-block.
“The mystery guy from the Harcourt event sounds too much like Kohler. It can’t be a coincidence.”
“Unlikely.”
“Did you store any images of the guy watching outside? I would probably recognize him.”
I sighed. “Dane didn’t have the camera from Eamon yet. If he comes back, we’ll find you immediately.”
He nodded, working through all the information. He shoved his hands deep into his coat pockets, and his breath made short, even pulses in front of him.
We hit Mount Vernon and turned. The hill ran down toward Charles.
“Corner of Walnut. Clear so far,” I said, low.
“Copy,” Dane said in my ear.
Wiley walked at my shoulder for another half block before he spoke again.
“Did you know him before this?”
I didn’t have to ask who. “No.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
“Why?”
“You work well together. That kind of well usually takes a couple of years.”
I kept my pace even. “We’ve worked the same circuit, Dane for The Guardians and me on my own. The circle isn’t large. You hear about people.”
“That’s not the same as working with them.”
“No, it isn’t.”
He let it ride for a few steps. I watched the second-floor windows on our left without turning my head.
“He doesn’t talk much,” Wiley said.
“He talks when it matters.”
“That’s a generous read.”
“It’s an accurate one.”
He didn’t push further. I logged the two sedans on the right side of the street and kept walking.
For a moment, I’d forgotten about the earpiece. Dane heard every word.
We turned at the bottom and started the long curve back.
A van sat at the corner of Walnut and Chestnut. It was white with no markings and idled, exhaust plumes rising in the pre-dawn air.
The driver wore a brown Carhartt with the collar turned up. His hands were on the wheel in the ten-and-two position. Nobody told him that real delivery drivers don’t sit at ten and two.
He didn’t look at us directly. He tracked us in his peripheral vision.
I didn’t break stride. I registered the plate in one pass.
After we passed, the van moved off the curb and started south toward Charles. The signal came on at the corner.
Wiley knew something had happened. “What?” he asked.
“Nothing you need to solve right now.”
We turned the last corner toward the house.
“Was that — “
“Later.”
He exhaled and let it go.
When the door closed behind us, my shoulders relaxed. I pulled the earpiece out and held it in my palm a moment before I closed my fingers around it.
The hall smelled faintly of Dane’s coffee. I found him in the kitchen and gave him the van details, including the plate.
Wiley went straight to the couch and the laptop. This time he didn’t hesitate before opening it. The walk had done what it needed to do. His focus came back as if he’d retrieved it from the street.
My phone buzzed. It was Eamon calling. I instantly put it on speaker.
“Farrow.”
“Price.”
“I have an update,” Eamon said.
“Go.”
“I’ve set up a meeting with Patterson. Tomorrow morning at a Guardians-controlled site.”
Wiley froze on the couch.
Cabot looked up.
Dane didn’t move.
“He says he wants to clear something up,” Eamon said.
“Did he offer, or did you ask?”
A brief pause. “He offered.”
“He’s either clean and scared,” Wiley said quietly, eyes on a screen he wasn’t reading, “or he’s not clean at all.”
“Or he’s being pushed,” Cabot said.
“We’ll treat it as compromised until proven otherwise,” Eamon said. “Site details inside the hour. Two-vehicle approach on separate routes.”
“Got it,” Dane said.
“One more thing.” A small, dry pause. “Samuel is settled. He’s eating breakfast. He sends his regards.”
Wiley’s hand left the trackpad. He pressed his thumb against the seam of his jeans, just above the knee, and held it there. “Tell him I’ll call at the time we said.”
“He knows. He verified the time with me.”
The line went dead.
None of us moved.